Let’s talk foundations design
Max has spent his career designing and developing exciting technologies, design systems, and creative culture — specializing in foundational systems, the building blocks for teams to create and grow. Those same foundations run through his work across product design, VFX, audio production, and 3D game development, a craft learned much before AI-centric design, and now celebrated alongside the many modern creative tools.
-
Lead of UI/UX product design for iOS and macOS Siri and Spotlight, later joining the Apple Music Production team to roll out the modernized native search feature suite.
-
Senior UX designer and design-system librarian for Material Design, promoted to interaction design lead for Live Chat, hardware integrations, and live ads.
-
Founding product designer, foundations designer, interaction design lead.
-
Independent 3D artist and creative technologist across desktop, AR, and VR.
Game dev & 3D design
Max builds physics experiments, playable games, product concepts, and 3D art, viewable across desktop, AR, and VR. The work draws heavily from the golden era of game development, using nostalgia as a lens for human-centric creativity in an increasingly automated field. His background in VFX and audio production makes each project feel personal, from custom lighting rigs to original sound, all shared through his YouTube channel.
Modernizing a design system – Apple
Nearly a decade on Apple’s Human Interface team, working across Siri, Spotlight, Music, Messages, and TV, meant work that sits at the systems level — rarely appearing as a single feature, but instead shaping interaction patterns across the platform as a whole.
Max joined in 2013 and began rebuilding foundational search, turning a standalone feature into a true OS-level system tool. The goal was to combine a person’s own data with results from the open web, rank them together, and surface the right one without a full query or an app launch. It required a strong series of templates flexible enough to support hundreds of apps, media types, and deep integrations, all presented within one consistent design language..
He later helped lead product design in applying the newly developed flat aesthetic, interactivity simplified geometry, and new studies in materials and spatial layouts to how content surfaces across the OS. That same visual language was adapted to macOS with the Yosemite redesign, moving deeper into the design system itself and giving interfaces a more physical, dimensional quality.
Apple Music (AMP)
Joining the Apple Music Production team, work centered on unifying design across Apple's media platforms as part of the same Human Interface push already underway — including a new modernized Apple TV, launched alongside Apple Music through the same effort. Partnered with Marcom's marketing team to carry both into their public launch campaigns.
Media search became one of the most deeply integrated categories in that effort, surfacing artist and track results directly inside OS-level search rather than requiring a separate app. On the product side, this meant designing the artist-page layout and the grid system used across Apple Music — including the featured placements used for artist takeovers, where an artist's own artwork became part of the interface itself.
YouTube Live
Max joined the YouTube Live team in 2021, right as live-streaming was shifting from a secondary feature into one of the platform's core priorities — a shift the pandemic pushed forward faster than anyone expected. Design-system librarian for YouTube's Material Design system, promoted within two years to interaction design lead incorporating Live Chat, hardware integrations, safety, and accessibility in live creation, partnering with the art department on multiple interactive “magic moments.”
Materials System Design, Live (2022)
A native space to create, integrate, and earn
As live-streaming was still finding its footing through fragmented tools and separate setups, YouTube introduced the Live Control Room — a purpose-built destination that brought everything creators needed into one native space inside the platform they already used, and a small suite of creator tools to support it. This was an owned product, scaling to world-wide live coverage including sporting events and presidential debates.
It felt native because it was, built for the moment live-streaming moved from novelty to everyday creation. It lowered the technical barrier and raised the creative ceiling: creators could focus on content and community instead of the plumbing, and start earning from the live energy they generated. Get started live-streaming with YouTube.
Live Control Room Product Demo, YouTube Live (2021)
Hardware & streaming integrations
Led integrations of hardware and third-party tools into Live Control Room, extending it beyond the browser and into the physical setups creators were already using — including the Elgato Stream Deck, OBS Studio, physical extensions of YouTube's live creator tools, and help creators earn without the effort of stream management across tools. That was the promise from the start — a true home base on the platform, designed so anyone with an idea and a connection could create, connect, and get paid.
Live Control Room Stream Integrations (2022)
"Our design should never appear as if by magic. We should always let the viewer know that behind every expression is a real person."
YouTube Standards 001, creative (2023)
By the time YouTube formalized its modernized aesthetic company-wide, the live team's own visual language for chat and creator tools — including new, more expressive Live Chat, custom created platform emoji, and branded artwork made specifically for live — reflected the same thinking the rest of the platform was converging on. The central belief has stayed influential: design should never feel like magic, and should always read as the work of real people, and is featured in the Core77 Design Award–winning publication “Standards 001.”
Founding creative at Together
Max began at Together AI in early 2023 as its founding product designer — before a public interface, a brand, or much certainty that AI infrastructure would become something big. The role went well past interface design: it meant establishing the earliest visual language and connecting with a new, hungry developer audience. This allowed for expressive, fresh, and 3D-centric creativity to differentiate our technology from the ocean of other generative AI providers.
Leading product design
Establishing Product Design Lead meant creating a full UI kit and series of UX principles from scratch, and was later promoted to Foundations Designer, a role focused on maintaining the core system frameworks and incorporating the brand across surfaces as the company scales. The current product interface reflects that same foundation — establishing the core services behind the AI-native cloud platform across the webUI, CLI, and API alike, built to make otherwise technical, cost-sensitive developer decisions feel simple. As new research unlocks new capabilities, the interface is built to keep pace with an evolving developer workflow. Sign up to get started.
Together AI Product UI Walkthrough (2026)
Building a brand
In early 2026, working alongside Pentagram and internal marketing, built an identity meant to stand apart from the droves of San Francisco-based AI startups. The goal wasn't distinctiveness for its own sake — it was meaning: human, connected, and honest about being a research lab building infrastructure rather than a lifestyle brand. The visual system reads as precision engineering rendered as art — modular, rule-based primitives that combine like machined parts — earning its personality through systematic precision, not ornament.
Getting that identity in front of an audience large enough to be noticed meant carrying it past the product and into go-to-market. From there, the same system extended into broader materials, live events, sales enablement, conceptual depth, and building affinity around it.
Branding & GTM Updates (2026)
Being human in 2026
Much of the Foundations Design role now means managing agentic creative workflows — designing the systems and MCPs that let AI agents act on a brand's behalf, not just the interfaces themselves. That raises a genuinely new version of an old question: what's actually left for a designer to do, when the tool in front of them can generate, iterate, and integrate on its own.
The answer hasn't changed as much as the tools have. Foundational decisions — what a brand looks like, what an agent is allowed to touch, what "correct" even means for a given system — still belong to a person, not the model executing them. Master the tools, and they stop limiting what's possible: fluency turns a tool into an extension of an idea, not an obstacle to it.
Creative Agentic Pipelines Demo (2026)
Let’s talk shop
Years of hands-on craft, distilled into a way of working built to be owned rather than just followed — the kind of foundation that turns a component library into an actual creative culture, not just a set of assets. The journey matters, and if its not collaborative and celebrated what is it all for?
Max hosts a small series of workshops, design sessions, and demos on atomic design, agentic creative workflows, and MCP generation pipelines. The goal is a system your team owns, one that grows into a creative culture rather than a folder of assets. If any of that matches what you’re after, let's talk shop.
Atomic Design & Foundations Workshop (2025)